Mike Michael

The University of Sydney · Department of Sociology and Social Policy

How do we engage with the threat of social and environmental degradation while creating and maintaining liveable and just worlds? Researchers from diverse backgrounds unpack this question through a series of original and committed contributions to this wide-ranging volume.

This entry begins by distinguishing speculative research from the broader cultural and academic meanings of “speculation.” The present “constructivist” approach to speculative research places emphasis on the ways in which the research question, the researcher, the researched and research device are actively involved in a process of becoming-with on...

Personal digital data are often imagined and experienced as invisible and immaterial phenomena, albeit with increasingly powerful impacts on people’s lives. In this article we discuss findings from an ethnographic project involving 30 participants in Sydney, Australia, directed at identifying their practices and understandings concerning their home...

Major changes to home life and work practices globally have been brought about by the COVID-19 crisis. Periods of strict restrictions placed on people’s movements outside their homes, aimed at curbing the spread of the novel coronavirus, have meant that the home was requisitioned as a primary site for work for many people. In this article, we draw...

Significant restrictions on movement outside the home due to the global COVID-19 pandemic have intensified the importance of everyday digital technologies for communicating remotely with intimate others. In this article, we draw on findings from a home-based video ethnography project in Sydney to identify the ways that digital devices and software...

In this paper we set out to explore the enactments of risk by clinicians involved in the development of stem cell therapy for liver disease. In the process, we contribute to a performative re-thinking of how ‘risk’ can be analytically treated in relation to health. The bulk of the paper, drawing on interview data, is concerned with how clinicians’...

Engaging publics in participatory events has become a central means to introducing lay people's voices into processes of technoscientific innovation and governance. However, little attention has been paid to the role of aesthetics, especially in terms of opening up potential ways of critically and creatively engaging with technoscientific matters o...

This exploratory paper investigates the enactment of a number of “publics” in relation to a recent, ostensibly “technical”, innovation, namely, the nanotechnology Vertically Aligned Nanotube Array-black (VANTAblack®). In particular, we show how various representations of VANTAblack—as technical artifact, as an exclusive artist’s material, as an exc...

This is the story of a set of computational devices called Energy Babbles. The product of a collaboration between designers and STS researchers, Energy Babbles are like automated talk radios obsessed with energy. Synthesised voices, punctuated by occasional jingles, recount energy policy announcements, remarks about energy conservation made on soci...

This exploratory article considers the implications of a particular genre – YouTube videos of iPhone destruction – for the Citizen Science and Public Understanding of Science/Public Engagement with Science and Technology. Situating this genre within a broader TV tradition of ‘destructive testing’ programmes, there is a description of the forms of d...

Post-Snowden, several highly-publicised events and scandals have drawn attention to the use of people's personal data by other actors and agencies, both legally and illicitly. In this article, we report the findings of a project in which we used cultural probes to generate discussion about personal digital dataveillance. Our findings suggest the pr...

Using social media in the workplace raises a number of issues for any occupation. In this article, we report the findings of a study that investigated how social media are used in a field of health work. The study uses semi-structured interviews conducted by telephone with 15 participants working in communicable disease in Australia. We identified...

This article considers the sociological role of activities that seem to make no sense: what can be learnt from episodes ‘unhinged’ from the routines of everyday life? In particular, stressing a processual framework for the study of everyday life, these unhinged episodes are regarded as useful for accessing its virtuality. The paper draws on literat...

In this article, we sketch a 'manifesto' for the 'public understanding of big data'. On the one hand, this entails such public understanding of science and public engagement with science and technology-tinged questions as follows: How, when and where are people exposed to, or do they engage with, big data? Who are regarded as big data's trustworthy...

The Energy Babble is a kind of automated talk-radio that is obsessed with energy and the environment. We developed it with, and deployed it to, a number of existing "energy communities" in the UK. The system gathers content from a variety of online sources, including Twitter? feeds from the communities, from governmental departments, and from the N...

The authors propose that techniques from art and design can be used within social science research as part of a speculative methodology and provide a set of heuristic principles for speculative method, characterizing it as processual, performative, playful, promising and propositional.

This article attends to the processes through which neuroscience and the neuro are enacted in a specific context: a translational neuroscience research group that was the setting of an ethnographic study. The article therefore provides a close-up perspective on the intersection of neuroscience and translational research. In the scientific setting w...

This paper aims to contribute to recent innovations in social scientific methodology that aspire to address the complex, iterative and performative dimensions of method. In particular, we focus on the becoming-with character of social events, and propose a speculative method for engaging with the not-as-yet. This work, being part of a larger projec...

This book has been about biomedical innovation and the practical, local, analytic, distributed efforts to determine whether a relatively mundane intervention (a pre-existing pharmaceutical drug or a combination of pre-existing pharmaceutical drugs for the treatment of HIV infections) amounts to a viable prophylactic against HIV infection. Toward th...

In this chapter we begin to explore the ‘singularization’ of the PrEP RCT. We pose the question: how are the pill, the RCTs and their bioethics each enacted as singular? As such, we mean to investigate how each is performed as a unitary object or event. Of course, we shall see that RCTs, the pill and bioethics are contested and we shall trace how t...

It is a commonplace to worry about the pace of innovation in biomedicine. From the perspective of some actors, innovation moves too quickly, throwing up complex regulatory issues and ethical dilemmas that are sometimes barely tractable. For others, innovation cannot take place fast enough: in the here and now, there are lives to be saved and there...

In this chapter we provide a partial history of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) as they have been applied within the HIV field in pursuit of prevention technologies. These RCTs are mostly prior to pre-exposure prophylactics (PrEP) and the account presented here is meant to contextualize our main object of study, PrEP, and particularly the contr...

In the previous chapter, we were concerned to trace the way that PrEP as a pill, PrEP RCTs and bioethics were collectively and mutually singularized. By focusing on various entities, not least through an engagement with expert and practitioner accounts, we showed how these were enacted as quantitative objects: that is to say, they were stabilized i...

In this chapter we once again attend to the complex eventuations of PrEP RCTs but broaden our analytic horizons to situate these within an account of the relationship between globalization and localization. In other words, we look at the ways in which the specific emergence and role of abstraction in PrEP RCTs are played out as convolutions or, bet...

The previous chapter laid out some of the key empirical settings out of which PrEP (and the various processes and procedures associated with its trialling) emerged, and into which it was introduced. In this chapter we begin to draw out the main literatures that inform our analysis of PrEP. As noted in Chapter 1, we do not see PrEP as an opportunity...

In this article we explore how two enactments of HIV – the UN’s AIDS Clock and clinical trials for an HIV biomedical prevention technology or pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) – entail particular globalizing and localizing dynamics. Drawing on Latour’s and Whitehead’s concept of proposition, and Serres’ call for a philosophy of prepositions, we use t...

Engagement events—whether interviews, installations, or participatory encounters—can entail a range of happenings which, in one way or another, "overspill" the empirical, analytic, or political framing of those engagement events. This article looks at how we might attend to these overspills—for instance, forms of "misbehavior" on the part of lay pa...

In this introduction, we address some of the complexities associated with the emergence of medicine’s bodies, not least as a means to ‘working with the body’ rather than simply producing a critique of medicine. We provide a brief review of some of the recent discussions on how to conceive of medicine and its bodies, noting the increasing attention...

This paper outlines a version of ‘live sociology’ that enacts and engages with the openness and processuality of events. This is initially explored through a focus on everyday objects that, in their relationality, ‘misbehave’, potentially challenging standard sociological framings. Drawing on the work of Isabelle Stengers, it is suggested that such...

Characterised by a shift from a diffusion to a deliberation model of science communication, the past decades have witnessed a proliferation of science communication formats. In order to better understand the complexity and novelty of these formats, we propose a ‘model of emergence’ that conceptualises science communication as an event in which the...

In this paper, we explore the tensions around a recent controversial development in medical tourism: xenotourism in Mexico. We take this bioendeavor – now ceased – to be emblematic of the global character of contemporary biomedicine, providing insights into the production and operation of scientific knowledge. We explore this through what we call t...

In this paper we present a particular history of Limulus polyphemus, the horseshoe crab, as a means of expanding on Haraway's notion of companion species. Drawing on accounts of the horseshoe crab's role, on the one hand, in work of the Serological Museum at Rutgers University that spanned the 1940s to the 1970s, and, on the other, in the developme...

Future expectations and promises are crucial to providing the dynamism and momentum upon which so many ventures in science and technology depend. This is especially the case for pre-market applications where practical utility and value has yet to be demonstrated and where investment must be mobilised. For instance, clinical biotechnology (including...

In this chapter we examine the challenges identified in the development of a pharmaceutically based oral HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis referred to as PrEP, and how the issues raised in the course of early and current clinical trials enable a rethinking of the possibilities for HIV prevention. Drawing on an ethnographic study of PrEP involving new th...

This paper is about expectations of oral PrEP, 'a pill a day' HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis that could be the first systemic form of HIV prevention for sexual or needle stick exposures. If found safe and effective--a difficult criteria to establish and, as such, is central to this paper--PrEP has the potential to significantly alter HIV prevention,...

This theoretical paper considers the ways in which the "publics" of public understanding of science and public engagement with science perform themselves not only in relation to science knowledge and scientific institutions, but also in relation to other publics. Specifically, through a survey of the literature, there is an exploration of the proce...

This article attempts to explore “dwelling” in the contemporary technonatural world through a series of novel interventions in the home. In particular, users' reactions to one of three “threshold devices”—the video window, the local barometer, and the plane tracker—are studied ethnographically. Drawing on Heidegger, the authors interpret the opaque...

This article considers how the figure of the ``user'' is deployed to imagine the assembling of location-based mobile phone technologies in the context of UK policy. Drawing on the sociology of expectations, we address the performativity of the ``user'' in the think tank Demos' publication Mobilisation. In the process, we analyze how discourses abou...

In this paper we examine the work of bioethics in the enactment of medically drugged bodies by focusing on the development of an oral pre-exposure chemo (drug) prophylaxis for preventing HIV, called PrEP. Our aim is to show how the operationalisation of bioethics to mediate drug development obscures a more complex and relational dynamic out of whic...

Will human embryonic stem (hES) cells lead to a revolutionary new regenerative medicine? We begin to answer this question by drawing on interviews with scientists and clinicians from leading labs and clinics in the UK and the USA, exploring their views on the bench-bedside interface in the fields of hES cells, neuroscience and diabetes. We employ B...

The challenges of transferring biomedical advances and non-biomedical technological innovations in HIV prevention and treatment to the field, are a theme of this year’s XVII International AIDS Conference. In the HIV field, innovations are often understood in exclusively biomedical or psychosocial terms. Related to these understandings are well-worn...

This paper aims to make an empirically informed analytical contribution to the development of a more socially embedded bioethics. Drawing upon 10 interviews with cutting edge stem cell researchers (5 scientists and 5 clinicians) it explores and illustrates the ways in which the role positions of translational researchers are shaped by the [Symbol:...

This article is an attempt to operationalize A.N. Whitehead's ontological approach within sociology. Whitehead offers lessons and clues to a way of re-envisioning `sociological practice' so that it captures something of the nature of a `social' that is at once real and constructed, material and cultural, and processual and actual. In the course of...

In this paper we offer some reflections on embryos in the biomedical worlds of embryonic stem cells (ESC) and pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD). We draw upon two ethnographic studies of the social practices of PGD and embryonic stem cell science to examine the notion of boundary objects as an approach for understanding the social constructio...

In this paper we discuss genetic discourses and practices in stem cell science. We report on how biomedical scientists, in both the UK and the USA, view the scientific literature and their own experimental research in the emerging field of human embryonic stem (hES) cells. We focus on the genetic manipulation of stem cells to make specialized (beta...

In this paper, we examine the controversy surrounding the Lumelsky protocol (which potentially could have transformed the procedures for differentiating embryonic stem cells into beta cells for diabetes treatment). The protocol is analyzed initially using Collins' core set model to show how the controversy over epistemic claims was resolved (and th...

In this paper we explore the temporalities entailed in scientists' accounts of their research into the use of human embryonic stem cells (hESC) to develop beta cells for the treatment of diabetes. Stem cell scientists, by virtue of working in what is still a controversial field, find themselves engaged with a variety of more or less transparent fut...

Most accounts of the ethics of stem cell research are de-contextualised reviews of the ethical and legal literature. In this chapter we present a socially embedded account of some of the ethical implications of stem cell research, from the perspectives of scientists directly involved in this area. Based on an ethnography of two leading embryonic st...

The movement of scientific research from the bench to the bedside is becoming an increasingly important aspect of modern 'biomedical societies'. There is, however, currently a dearth of social science research on the interaction between the laboratory and the clinic. The recent upsurge in global funding for stem cell research is largely premised on...

Most accounts of the ethics of stem cell research are de- contextualised reviews of the ethical and legal literature. In this chapter we present a socially embedded account of some of the ethical implications of stem cell research, from the perspectives of scientists directly involved in this area. Based on an ethnography of two leading embryonic s...

This paper explores the institutional regulation of novel biosciences, hybrid technologies that often disturb and challenge existing regulatory frameworks. Developing a conceptual vocabulary for understanding the relationship between material and institutional hybrids, the paper compares human tissue engineering (TE) and xenotransplantation (XT), a...

My Saturday newspaper tells me that in 2020, Britain, and by extension much of the rest of the western world, will be a very different place (the Guardian, 2020 Supplement, 18 September 2004). Everyday life will be transformed in many ways. In rich societies such as Britain, microchips will be ubiquitous, making hitherto 'dumb' materials such as br...

Conventional boundaries of the material and social worlds are increasingly challenged in late modern society. Human and animal matters have been globally mobilised in a worldwide traffic of scientific, medical and commercial transactions. Whilst human implant technologies have a long history, contemporary technoscience has thrown up an ever-wider r...

This paper explores the institutional regulation of novel biosciences, hybrid technologies that often disturb and challenge existing regulatory frameworks. Developing a conceptual vocabulary for understanding the relationship between material and institutional hybrids, the paper compares human tissue engineering (TE) and xenotransplantation (XT), a...

This paper has two broad objectives. First, the paper aims to treat roadkill as a topic of serious social scientific inquiry by addressing it as a cultural artifact through which various identities are played out. Thus, the paper shows how the idea of roadkill-as-food mediates contradictions and ironies in American identities concerned with hunting...

This paper is concerned with the ways in which lay people come to understand and assess xenotransplantation. Drawing on focus group data, we explore how people can both demonstrate a collective process of cost–benefit thinking and tacitly problematize this by deploying three meta-arguments that we call "trust," "telos," and "trump." Respectively, t...

Novel biotechnologies present acute difficulties to regulation for the very reason that they traverse the boundaries between existing regulatory authorities, their terms of reference, their disciplinary capabilities, and so on. To this extent, they are hybrid phenomena, difficult to categorise and a source of acute uncertainty. Moreover, most biote...

This article is concerned with how we might go about theorizing the roles of nonhumans (technologies, animals, etc.), and their associations with humans, in the production of ‘social data’. Drawing on recent sociological work on heterogeneity, the article explores how nonhumans contribute to the emergence of both the ‘microsocial’ and ‘macrosocial’...

This paper is an analysis of educational materials produced by the United Kingdom's Medical Research Council (MRC). While the MRC's Research Updates are designed to be used in the classroom, interviews with MRC contributors to the Updates and with teachers and students show that their function is complex. Drawing on these data, we point to three fa...

This article examines the relation of technology to temporality. Exotic technologies - iconically information and communication technologies and biotechnologies - typically evoke change and the novel character of the present epoch. Yet these enter a world of mundane technologies that putatively serve merely in social reproduction. It is argued that...

About the book: Cultural Bodies: Ethnography and Theory is a unique collection that integrates two increasingly key areas of social and cultural research: the body and ethnography. Breaks new ground in an area of study that continues to be a central theme of debate and research across the humanities and social sciences. Draws on ethnography as a us...

In this paper, we suggest that the basis on which risk is publicly managed is presently in a process of transition from the demonstration of expert authority to that of public authenticity. That is, in today's contexts of contested trust, the achievement of an authentic persona has become an increasingly important representational objective for bot...

This article examines the main approaches to public understanding of science (PUS) in light of recent developments in social and cultural theory. While traditional and critical perspectives on PUS differ in terms of their models of the public, science, and understanding, they nevertheless share a number of commonalities, which are humanism (an emph...

This paper looks at the deployment of a medical technique, reflex anal dilatation and contrasts the way in which its deployment was a subject of enormous controversy in the Cleveland child sexual abuse affair with its comparatively unproblematic previous use to identify homosexuality. We interpret this contrast using two general frameworks: recent...

This paper examines the public understanding of science, especially biotechnology and the new genetics, in light of the symbolic roles of animals in the constitution of cultural identities. As such, the paper expands on the critical approach to public understanding of science, with its emphasis upon the way local identities impact upon the apprehen...

How does one draw the boundary between scientific fact and science fiction? As is well-known, this seemingly innocent question belies the complex inter-weavings—and the co-constitution—of the ‘factual’ and the ‘fictional’. For example, over recent years there has been a growth in popular dramas that use developments in the biomedical sciences as ce...

This article discusses xenotransplantation (XTP: the surgical role of nonhuman tissues, organs, and cells for human transplantation) and examines the way its scientific promoters have defended their technology against potentially damaging public representations. The authors explore the criteria used to legitimate the selection of the pig as the bes...

This article begins with a consideration of the `pure' unmediated relation between the human body and nature, exemplified, in different ways, by environmental expressivism, and Ingold's subtle analysis of affordance and the taskscape. It is argued that perspectives fail properly to incorporate the role of mundane technology in the mediation of huma...

Approche programmatique de la constitution d'une science politique specifique par le discours scientifique. Examinant la distinction et l'interaction entre science et non-science, l'A. presente les differents modeles implicites et explicites de dialogue qui accompagnent la comprehension publique de la science et l'apprehension commune des propriete...

This paper sketches an alternative to two of the key polar perspectives in contemporary social psychology, namely cognitive psychology and rhetorical psychology. In contrast to the ‘closed fist’ of the former, and the ‘open hand’ of the latter, we counterpose the ‘invisible arm’ of the unthought. By this, we mean that prior to these modes of though...

This paper sketches an alternative to two of the key polar perspectives in contemporary social psychology, namely cognitive psychology and rhetorical psychology. In contrast to the ‘closed fist’ of the former, and the ‘open hand’ of the latter, we counterpose the ‘invisible arm’ of the unthought. By this, we mean that prior to these modes of though...

This paper explores how the “public understanding of science” might be reconceptualized in light of the recent sociological treatments of consumption. I consider the implications that the rise of consumer culture and the increasing aesthetisization of everyday life have for micro-and macro-sociological studies in the public understanding of science...

This review essay, in addition to presenting a general overview of the three volumes, interrogates their claims to being contributions to the `new paradigm' in social psychology. Firstly, it is noted that the political dimension of the `crisis' critiques of orthodox experimental social psychology is largely absent from these volumes. This is partic...

In this paper, we are concerned with the ways in which pain and redundancy might be accommodated within the framework of Actor-Network. Theory. We pose the question: what are the consequences, both analytic and human, when technologies and humans are removed from sociotechnical networks? Taking the production of Trident as the 'core business' of th...

This article addresses some of the ways in which the development of xenotransplantation, the use of nonhuman animals as organ donors, are presented in media accounts. Although xenotransplantation raises many ethical and philosophical questions, media coverage typically minimizes these. At issue are widespread public concerns about the transgression...